On Atlas Shrugged

This review contains some spoilers! That being said, it’s mostly a reflection on the experience of reading the book, and doesn’t explain much of the story.

I spent the month of November trudging my way through Ayn Rand’s magnum opus - Atlas Shrugged. For the uninitiated, Atlas Shrugged is a book about a group of industrialists suffering in a society that increasingly coddles the general populace to be okay with their mediocrity. The industrialists eventually escape to a secret society in Colorado to show the overreaching evil government that the country cannot survive without their individual sacrifice and effort.

This book was not so different from my 3 hour uphill hike to the top of Mount Si. It was a windy road with steep parts, interspersed with a few pleasant lookouts, only to be followed by the most tiring switchbacks where you pray to Gods you didn’t believe in 20 minutes earlier. Excluding the 100-page monologue towards the end that I skipped in favor of retaining my sanity, I did end up finishing the book and getting to a reasonably pleasant lookout.

The characters at the beginning were interesting enough to keep me hooked. I understood Dagny’s passion for building her railroad, I admired her tenacity to keep moving forward and I felt her pain when dealing with incompetence everywhere. The story moved along smoothly albeit with a lot of verbose prose to accompany it. The main problem was repetition - the book sometimes felt like a stream of unfiltered thought that nobody bothered to edit.

You realize early on that Ayn Rand is really, quite horny. The romance portions of the book are over the top, with very little being left to the imagination of the reader. Coupled with my belief that Dagny Taggart represents Ayn Rand (or a an aspirational version of her) leads to some interesting conclusions. Unlike Mrs. Rand though, I’ll leave some things unsaid.

The villains in this story are caricatures of humans - sane, reasonable people would have stopped the horror show and absurdity at various points in the book (I’d like to believe this is true). Here’s a line from James Taggart:

“It’s your sin if I suffer! It’s your moral failure! I’m your brother, therefore I’m your responsibility, but you’ve failed to supply my wants, therefore you’re guilty!”

I can scarcely imagine a human being uttering these words to someone else, let alone his own sister. However, the world is vast and weird, and there are 7 billion humans, so it’s certainly possible I’m just not privy to that part of society yet.

To internalize the arguments here (and as a general principle for life), I found it helpful to think about the most relaxed version of the argument I agreed with. In this case, that was:

• People without agency and integrity, just armed with a blind lust for meaningless power are dangerous, and will often reach powerful positions over people who do the actual work.
• It is not the role of the minority of industrious people to support a majority that is constantly suffocating the formers ability to function.

Speaking of caricatures, the fact that this Government was efficient enough to constantly pass legislation that materially changes the day-to-day of things was the least believable part of the book. Congress in real life feels like an immovable object, going nowhere, doing nothing - unlike the dynamic and legislation hungry rulers of anti-Randotopia. Touching base with reality though, the manifestation of “big government” in the 50 years since this book was written hasn’t really led to the outcomes the book suggests.

As I went through the chapters, I did love capitalism a bit more. Before starting this book I scoffed at the people who judged someone for reading Ayn Rand - as if my opinions were so malleable to be swayed by a single work of fiction. Well, they were - for a bit anyway. It took a week after being done with the book to stop drinking the Kool-aid, but can you blame me when the book includes bangers like this:

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

While I have had my critiques, and while I think Ayn Rand was never fully satisfied sexually in her life, when the Coloradoans executed a daring rescue of John Galt from a tiny underground cell, I couldn’t help but cheer for them. And when I had nothing else to do my last day on vacation, I was glad to go back to those characters for company. For that, I loved Atlas Shrugged.

Thanks to VS for feedback on the first draft of this post!